Mortality and the contradictions of modernity

Providence is the idea that the world and human interests are being cared
for, provided for, by some ultimate power (typically, a god) that ensures
the unity and order of the cosmos. On this view, everything that happens
to us, no matter how bizarre, can be explained by appeal to the place
of humanity in this broader unified existence. No matter how bad things
get, providence ensures that things are just as they should be. In this
way, the belief in providence is a response to certain harsh and inescapable
features of life, namely, suffering, evil and death. In Providence
Lost, Genevieve Lloyd counts these three features in the category
of ‘necessity’. The necessities of life are not simply those
things we must have to survive, but those things that are fundamentally
inescapable in human life. The belief in providence makes it possible
to live with the anxieties that these necessities arouse without debilitating
fear. Lloyd comprehensively traces the history of the idea providence
from the Ancient Greeks, with special attention on the Stoics, through
medieval and early modern philosophy to its demise in philosophy in the
19th century. Throughout, she clearly conveys the monumental intellectual
effort required to reconcile the existence of evil with providence, most
notably in the accounts of Augustine, Descartes and Leibniz, each of whom
is prepared to accept the suffering of children as the price of divine
order.

Providence Lost concludes with an insightful analysis of contemporary
life. Lloyd has two points to make. First, in the disenchanted world of
modernity, the possibility of a good life requires that we find a way
of living with necessity without the guarantees provided by a benevolent
cosmic order. This task is made all the more difficult because (and this
is her second point), much contemporary discussion around ideas of a good
life, either in philosophical debates or in the popular media, is deeply
incoherent because it retains providential assumptions of unity and order
while explicitly embracing godlessness. While such assumptions might seem
benign, this is far from the case. For one thing, whatever the ultimate
order of the universe might be on this view, there is nothing in it to
suggest that it is ultimately benevolent. The upshot of this is that in
the secular, godless world of modernity, unexamined assumptions of order
and unity create a ‘misfit between the individual and collective
possibilities of life’ (p. 307).

In explaining this peculiar feature of modern life, Lloyd argues that
at the individual level, we continue to face the same old necessities:
illness, accident and death. The timing of these is a matter of contingency,
and therefore, a source of the usual anxieties which we ameliorate through
various psychological rituals: icy ocean dips, drugs or scented oils.
What is distinctive about modernity, according to Lloyd, is that these
individual struggles go on against a backdrop of social practices which
imply an irrational belief that the limits of necessity can be pushed
ever farther back. In other words, as individuals we acknowledge the limitations
that go with human mortality, and we conduct ourselves accordingly. For
example, we take precautions against illnesses, we take out insurance,
and we plan for our old age. At the same time, however, at the collective
level, we engage in activities that assume that those limitations can
be over-ridden, and that they are not necessary after all. For example,
society provides cosmetic and pharmaceutical services which claim to make
us look and feel younger—as if it is possible to actually become
younger. To illustrate the tensions here, Lloyd claims that we continue
to talk about striving for a balanced life and weighing up good and evil.
However, the very idea of a ‘balanced’ life assumes that there
is some final, ultimate order of life and the universe that we could appeal
to in order justify the truth about an assertion that any particular life
is balanced or unbalanced. That ultimate order would function as a standard
of measure against which the degree of balance or imbalance could be determined.
This is precisely the role that providence has played. In the absence
of providence, however, these ideas become incoherent. Once the belief
in god or some other ultimate cosmic order is abandoned, there can be
no final state of affairs against which any particular state of affairs
can be measured or compared. Lloyd illustrates the absurdity of talk about
balance when she notes a commentator’s ironic quip that perhaps
the Howard Government’s refugee policy found the right balance between
compassion and cruelty (p. 315). Similarly, good and evil can compete
or be compared only where their efforts can be referred to a single system
of estimation. In a world without ultimate limits good and evil become
radically incommensurable.

The belief in providence is a
response to certain harsh and inescap-
able features of life.

Lloyd is not proposing to reinstate providence. Rather, she is arguing
that with the loss of providence we have lost an important means of making
sense of our lives. We face the challenge of reconciling individual need
to manage necessity with social practices that court denial of necessity.
Life in a world without providence is life in a world without absolute
limits, and this gives rise to equally limitless anxieties. We are no
longer sure where the border lies between what is within our power and
what is without, and, consequently, the limits of personal responsibility
become infinitely shifting. There seems no way of determining the balance
among competing interests, ends and values, and the very idea that good
could triumph over evil cease

s to make sense when there can be no guarantee that what lies beyond
our own powers is benevolent. In contrast to earlier conceptions of a
good life—especially the Stoics’—the necessities of
life are for us, just more fuel for anxiety. With the loss of providence
we are detached from the goods that collective life formerly provided
for dealing with the anxieties of mortality. These were social activities
associated with belief in god or divine providence, which provided psychological
and emotional assurance in the face of harsh and inescapable realities:
faith in salvation and redemption, communal worship, and a strong sense
of belonging.

Just think for a moment about the ways we moderns attempt to alleviate
our anxieties and you will quickly find that they are premised upon contradictory
forces of limitlessness and order. We try to control the uncontrollable
through things like technology, pharmaceuticals, surgery, and the acquisition
of personal wealth. But this search for control is itself a product of
a providential worldview. It assumes that the solution to the anxieties
of living with necessity lies in some ultimately determinate state of
affairs. Once we have brought about that state of affairs, our anxieties
are expected to evaporate and we will be, finally, young enough, beautiful
enough, sexy enough, lovable enough, relaxed enough, clever enough, and
so on and so on. But attempts at achieving such a state of affairs go
on in a collective milieu that runs counter to the very idea of a terminal
state of affairs. Despite pleas for sustainability, private and public
sectors repeatedly declare the importance of increasing consumption; genetic
technology and experimentation continues to break down the boundaries
that have differentiated species; and governmental attempts at regulating
carbon emissions lack the urgency that the temporal limitations of the
human lifespan would dictate.

The idea of providence was a response to the anxiety engendered by the
fact that we live under conditions of uncertainty. Those conditions derive
from our mortality. Providence, therefore, links life and death. On the
providential view, no-one dies for nothing. As Lloyd explains, this is
foreign to modern thinking. In a world without an afterlife, death and
its associated conditions have come to be regarded as meaningless at best,
tragic at worst. Consequently, we are threatened with the prospect of
having very little to say about our mortality; we are becoming dumbstruck
about the most fundamentally defining feature of ourselves. Consider the
ever-growing practices premised upon our incapacity to speak meaningfully
of ageing and death: a medical system that does not know how to stop treatment;
cradle-to-grave cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries; a technology sector
that regards experimentation as an end in itself; and a mass media saturated
with images and ideas disconnected from the lives of actual human beings.

Lloyd is not proposing to reinstate
providence.

Lloyd proposes that a remedy for what ails us can be found in the thought
of 17th century Dutch philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza, whose work is
heavily indebted to the Stoics. Lloyd is a heavyweight in the world of
Spinoza scholarship, and brings a marvellous lucidity and economy to her
discussions both of Spinoza’s philosophy and its Stoic influences.
The Stoics, like Ancient philosophy in general, were concerned with the
question of what constitutes a good life. Fundamental to this question
was a concern with managing emotions and attitudes in the face of unavoidable
sufferings for which little, if anything could be done: disease, debilitation,
and pain in a world without antibiotics or anaesthetics, and the ravages
of natural disasters in a world without earthquake warnings or satellite
weather forecasting. And this in a culture where war was omnipresent and
heroism was imperative.

The Stoics advised that we could not only manage suffering but achieve
a good life by understanding our natures and what is necessary in them,
and then by living in accordance with those necessities. If life is to
be tolerable, we must make the effort to do as nature demands. This appeal
to obeying nature may seem like a constraint upon us, but it is the key
to understanding our freedom and happiness. To illustrate, Lloyd cites
the example of a baby struggling to walk. The child does not choose to
walk, any more than it chooses to breathe. However, the child’s
struggle is not a struggle against something that is preventing
it from acting freely; it is a struggle to engage with its own nature,
to co-ordinate its body with its environment. The effort to walk arises
from a natural impulse, a necessity of the child’s nature. Lloyd,
following the Stoics, describes this as an ‘appropriation’
of the natural impulse. Although the child acts from the necessity of
its nature, we do not regard the child as being so constrained. To the
contrary, we regard it as essential to the child’s liberty, and
a cause to be happy. Similarly, elite athletes, concert musicians, and
even philosophers exercise their freedom to become who they want to be
by putting their powers to use in the way that nature deems necessary,
for example, in accordance with the necessities of sensory-motor function,
joint range of movement, and cerebral neuro-transmission.

This all seems fine until we come to the less palatable necessities of
mortality: disease and death. Here the Stoic reputation for forbearance
comes into its own. The Stoics believed that that it is in our nature
to fall ill and die, and if we see in the necessities of nature the cause
for our happiness we cannot, on pain of incoherence, have it so on some
occasions but not others. Pain and illness do not stand in the way of
a good life because a good life is one directly at grips with what cannot
be evaded in human nature. When the Stoics insist upon the recognition
and understanding of human nature they mean for that to be full
understanding, the kind of understanding that nature provides for, namely,
the full acceptance of necessity—not only of sickness, suffering
and death, but also of friendship, imagination, caring and joy. In this
way, necessity, freedom, and a life worth living are intimately interwoven.

If life is to be tolerable, we
must make the effort to do as nature demands.

Lloyd argues that this idea of acceptance and appropriation of necessity
goes against the grain of modernity, where we have been taught that what
is essential to attaining a good life is our capacity to tear ourselves
away from nature through the exercise of the free will. But the difficulty
in thinking of necessity as freedom is also because modernity has lost
sight of an essential component of the Stoic philosophy, namely, the idea
of affection for the self. This idea of affection is not the acquisitive
love of desire, but more like a close familiarity and willing submission
to what is best in us and which nature has bestowed upon us. It is a holistic
conception of caring for one’s own flourishing that goes far beyond
the mere satisfaction of self-interest. It is a willing embrace of the
whole gamut of the human condition, from those features that render us
vulnerable to physical and psychological suffering to those that enable
our most intense exuberance and exultation. However, in more recent times,
self-interest has come to replace self-affection. The moral justifications
of so much of modern life—liberal democracy, the rule of law, freedom
of choice—all turn on the sanctity of self-interest. Thinkers in
the liberal tradition have told us that every person is to be regarded
as an end-in-itself and, consequently, that we are each to determine our
own conception of the good life. Everything is settled by demarcation
of free wills. Nowhere in sight is the suggestion that what really matters
for freedom might be the preservation of our capacity to be familiar with
and willingly submit to what is most properly our own, and, therefore,
what is best in us. This is why Stoics’ views on death differ so
much from our own. For them, death had to be understood as part of everyday
life, because mortality was understood as absolutely central to human
nature, and, therefore, to a good life. Here, Lloyd cites with approval
Seneca’s insistence that a fear of death is a failure to properly
engage with life.

While there is much to admire in Stoic philosophy, it suffers from two
significant limitations: first, the relative simplicity of their views
of the necessities that constitute human nature in comparison with the
complexities of contemporary sciences. For example, ancient theories concerning
the scope and functions of human physiology and psychology—and what
those features required of a good life—were rudimentary to say the
least. Second, the Stoics have an over-confidence in the capacity of human
beings to absorb violence. We moderns have mass media and globalisation
with continuously televised, re-playable actual killings, perversions
and disasters, where the corpses of children, the burnt, degraded and
mutilated fill our homes, offices and even gymnasiums, in non-stop news
carnage from which it is almost impossible to shelter. And then there
is what passes for fiction and entertainment in television, film and multimedia.
While ancient Greek men were much more likely to be personally involved
in killings in war, honour and belief in the afterlife played a significant
role in the psychology of war, both for individuals and for armies. Nothing
in the Greek world could match the scale of killing and the extent of
awareness of it made possible by the industrialisation of weapons and
war coupled with mass communication and globalisation. The Stoics can
be forgiven if they failed to imagine the kind of exigencies that could
unhinge a human being.

Modern life is increasingly characterised
by alienation.

It is entirely possible that one could have a good life by chance alone,
but the idea that a good life could simply be left to chance is intolerable
to even the most basic exercise of reason and desire. This is why our
freedom is so important to us. It is through our freedom—through
what we do—that we triumph over the mere contingency of luck. Lloyd
recounts how Spinoza, inspired by the Stoics, argued that for complex
mortals like ourselves, gifted with emotions, imagination, memory and
reason, our freedom can only consist in the exercise of those same powers.
Freedom ‘derives from the active engagement of the mind with necessity,
an engagement that flows from understanding’ (p. 201). The activity
of the mind proposed by Spinoza is the pursuit of truth. However, this
is not the work of a merely abstract intellect analysing propositional
logic. Rather, it is a practical intelligence which understands
what and who we are by using the full range of our powers. According to
Spinoza, the practical intellectual activity of understanding in the pursuit
of truth will lead to a joy more intense than any other emotion. That
emotion derives from that aspect of ourselves so valued by Stoicism, namely,
our capacity to feel affection for our nature. That affection is constituted
by our ready openness to and familiarity with human nature, and a genuine
concern to understand and pursue what contributes to the flourishing of
that nature. The affective character of truth is expressive of a deep
understanding of our belonging to nature, an experience that stands in
dramatic contrast to the contemporary condition of alienation that can
neither comprehend nor care for human mortality.

Modern life is increasingly characterised by alienation: we become strangers
to ourselves to the extent that we fail to grasp our natures and its necessities—not
only bodily necessities of physicality, sensuality, ageing and imperfection,
but psychological necessities of fear, hope, and predictability, as well
as interpersonal necessities of recognition, exchange, solidarity and
sacrifice. We are anchored to the earth and to each other by these series
of overlapping necessities, yet we are constantly encouraged to treat
them as if they are merely contingent features of our existence. This
misfit means we will never be at ease with ourselves in the world unless
we become affectionately open to what is necessary in human life by actively
engaging our minds with those necessities through the full powers of our
understanding in the pursuit of truth.

But how do we know when we have grasped a truth about necessity and not
merely a contingent feature of a culture? This question adds a further
difficulty to the task facing modernity. We know that what passed for
truth at one time in human history was superseded by other. Miasmas gave
way to bacteria, and animal spirits gave way to neural networks. In a
world without an absolute limit there can be no absolute truths. Here
Lloyd cites Hegel’s analysis that one’s view of necessity
lies ‘at the root of the content and discontent of men, and …
in that way determines their destiny itself’ (p. 301). Our destiny
lies in how we respond to our mortality. How we exercise our practical
understanding to this end will determine our fates, not technology or
television or dieting, not even the caprices of gods or demons. Instead
of looking to the stars for the meaning of life we need to look much closer
to home: to our spotty, ageing bodies and our flawed and funny minds.
That is our lot. It’s quite a lot, actually.

Dr Kim Atkins is a consultant with the Tasmanian Department of Health
and Human Services, and an Honorary Research Associate in the School of
Sociology and Social Work at the University of Tasmania. Her publications
include Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective
(2008, Routledge, NY & Oxford), and Practical Identity and Narrative
Agency, co-edited with Catriona Mackenzie (2008, Routledge, NY &
Oxford).